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Pump Up The Bhangra: The Sound Of Asian Britain

Pump Up The Bhangra: The Sound Of Asian Britain

  • Overview
  • Cast
  • Crew

Status

Released

Release Date

Aug 24, 2018

Runtime

1h 0m

Genres

Documentary

Original Title

Pump Up The Bhangra: The Sound Of Asian Britain

Director

Ashok Prasad

Description

Pump Up the Bhangra is a celebration of the way young British Asians have found their voice and their identity through bhangra music over the past thirty years. Fronted by BBC Asian Network DJ Bobby Friction, the film tells the story of how a simple folk tradition from the wheat fields of north India was transformed in the 1980s to become a unique British club music - outselling many mainstream UK acts. It's a story of cassette tapes, corner shops and glitter-clad musical heroes, of teenagers bunking off school to attend secret daytime gigs and of generational culture clashes - as this underground scene became as popular among Asians as Wham and Culture Club were to the mainstream. The film traces the birth of bhangra amid the early Punjabi immigrants in the steel foundries of the West Midlands. It explores its glitzy heyday when, despite selling hundreds of thousands of records, artists remained unknown by the mainstream and failed to make it into the charts.